Conference Program

For John Dewey democracy is not just a form of government but “a mode of associated living” (Dewey 1916, 93). So education for democratic citizenship should not be limited to the knowledge of certain political institutions and procedures, but it concerns children’s experience of living in a democratic community. Moreover, according to John Dewey “experience is primarily an active-passive affair” (Dewey 1916, 147) and not cognitive. Thus, the question that arises is what kind of activities should children undergo in order to have a democratic experience in their school community.

In this paper, I argue that in his early writings John Dewey gives emphasis to productive work and he supports that the schools fail to be transformed in democratic communities because of the lack of it (Dewey 1897). This is one of the reasons why Laboratory School’s curriculum was organized based on certain occupations of constructive work, such as cooking, carpeting and weaving. This early perspective seems to overlook the significance of communication to democratic experience. As Honneth & Farrell (1998) note, the disregard of communication is due to the wider disregard of the necessity of an autonomous political sphere. In his work after 1916, John Dewey makes a communicative turn (Biesta 2006) and he develops a richer analysis about human communication as the peculiar way of human interaction and its importance in democratic communities. However, his distance from actual pedagogical experimentation didn’t allow him to elaborate how this new notion of communication can be integrated in pedagogical practices. Although scholars such as Stitzlein (2020) have already indicated how we can integrate Dewey’s notion of communication in the teaching process, I argue that Dewey’s analysis can also help us to recognize the importance of communication beyond teaching as it concerns the whole arrangement of school’s everyday life. Moreover, I argue that following Dewey’s thought on the interrelation between children’s activities and democratic experience in school communities, we should be critical to his exclusive emphasis on constructive work and employ our pedagogical imagination in order to integrate care-work in the pedagogical procedures.

From early childhood, education for democratic citizenship can be understood not only as a value to be transmitted but as a lived and shared experience. From this perspective, the paper presents the experience of Officina Koinè, a Children and Families Center created as a participatory laboratory of democratic education based on unstructured play. The pedagogical approach adopted by Officina Koinè is grounded in the idea that play - when it is free, non-directive, and intergenerational - constitutes an inclusive language that foster and generate participation, relationship and shared meaning-making, thus becoming a concrete practice of citizenship for both children and adults (Biffi, 2023).

This experience fits within a theoretical framework that considers learning and democratic education as social and cooperative experiences (Dewey, 1916; Elia, 2021). At Officina Koinè, educators, children, parents, and “adulti di casa” share play spaces built through the use of unstructured and open-ended materials, devoid of any specific prescribed function. This methodological choice fosters universal accessibility and the absence of hierarchies and predetermined uses, allowing each participant to contribute to the construction of the experience according to their own possibilities, languages, and cultures (Antonacci, 2023). Play thus becomes a democratic device that enables the renegotiation of roles, knowledge, and positions, opening up more horizontal and inclusive relationships. In addition to outlining the pedagogical approach adopted by the service, the paper aims to present and analyze the evidence emerging from observations conducted during play experiences, from focus groups with parents and educators, and from co-reflection sessions activated within the working group (Dalberg et al., 2024). From these moments of participation, several recurring dimensions emerge: play as a space to fostering relation; open-ended materials as facilitators of cooperation, negotiation, and divergent thinking; adult participation as an opportunity for mutual learning; and the construction of a sense of community belonging even among culturally and socially diverse families (Moss, 2012). The extension of the project into the city’s public spaces- through the experience of Officina Urbana, which brings unstructured play into squares and parks- also shows how play can reconfigure the everyday places of citizens into inclusive and accessible environments (Granata, 2021; Nuti, 2024). This experience engage families distant from formal educational services and foster a sense of participation and belonging. From this perspective, unstructured and open-ended play emerges as a cultural and political practice to counter educational models centered on performance and measurability, opening spaces for imagination and co-learning and foster the possibility for children and adults to recognize themselves as active members of a community, rather than merely as users or consumers of services (Biesta & Montà, 2023). The paper therefore seeks to offer a reflection on the role of open-ended play as a democratic experience in early childhood, proposing Officina Koinè as an example of how education can become a generative practice for new inclusive worlds, in which childhood is not only the recipient of rights but a living space for building new democratic possibilities.

Educational guidance, as a key tool for the academic and educational success of every student, plays a fundamental role in deconstructing gender stereotypes and prejudices that still limit and influence the life choices of young people today. The current reality of children's and adolescents' rights is the result of a slow and difficult historical process of transformation that has changed the image of childhood from a marginal, misunderstood and ignored age to a specific stage of human life in which the unfinished child finally becomes a subject of law and a social actor. In order to legitimise their voices, children should not be considered passive recipients of education but active agents involved in shaping the context in which they live, as well as their own development. The right of children to express themselves and their potential translates into the creation of educational pathways that promote autonomy, critical thinking and the ability to make conscious choices. In this sense, with the help of educational guidance, children are encouraged to explore their interests, recognise and overcome stereotypes, and embrace their inclinations, thus promoting balanced and inclusive growth. Within the framework of the rights and equal opportunities of children and adolescents, guidance is a key tool for ensuring that everyone has a fair path to personal and professional growth and development, free from inequality and discrimination. An intersectional approach recognises the complexity of the guidance process, highlights its dimensions and multiple aspects and ensures alignment with educational policies and teaching activities. This promotes flexible and personalised guidance, valuing individual and collective experiences. Promoting guidance pathways from childhood onwards is essential to ensure that everyone has the same rights and opportunities to education and work, fostering greater awareness of oneself, one's abilities and one's aspirations.

In contemporary educational debates, the concept of agency has become a recurring keyword in reflections on democratic education and childhood. Often interpreted as an intrinsic quality of the child or as an individual competence to be fostered, agency risks being framed as a neutral and transferable attribute, almost independent of the relational and institutional conditions that make its enactment possible. Starting from the idea of children as citizens in the present, agency is situated within a broader reflection on democratic experience in early educational contexts. Rather than being reduced to the transmission and acquisition of civic values or formal competences, it concerns the construction of conditions that enable meaningful participation and shared action. In this perspective, agency does not simply coincide with the possibility of choice or self-expression; rather, it entails participation in processes that generate recognisable effects within one’s own context, in this case the school environment. The empirical core of this contribution consists of participatory workshops conducted as part of a doctoral research project involving primary and lower secondary school classes. These workshops, focused on the co-design and transformation of school spaces, are analysed not so much in terms of their design outcomes, but rather through the decision-making processes that underpin them. A central role is played by student assemblies, understood as pedagogical devices for public deliberation. During these moments, proposals developed within small groups are presented, discussed, and collectively reformulated. The assembly thus becomes a space where dynamics of leadership, conflict, alliance, and mediation are made visible, and where decisions are not reduced to simple voting procedures but are constructed through argumentation, negotiation, and engagement with concrete constraints, such as safety regulations involved in modifying school spaces. It is within the assembly space that agency emerges as a situated practice: not merely the individual expression of preferences, but participation in a collective process capable of shaping shared decisions. The comparative analysis shows that, despite similar declared objectives, participatory practices produce different outcomes depending on the context. In some cases, agency takes the form of an increased awareness of the possibility of influencing one’s environment; in others, it assumes a more transformative dimension, challenging spatial and organisational arrangements predefined by adults. These are not different forms of agency, but situated enactments, shaped by school culture and social context. Furthermore, a gap emerges between the principles of democratic education and everyday practices: participation is often reduced to choices within pre-defined boundaries, resulting in predominantly formal experiences. Agency thus appears not as an acquired condition, but as a process that depends on the organisational and relational conditions that make it possible. From this perspective, early educational contexts can be understood as spaces in which democratic participation is not assumed, but constructed through concrete and shared practices.

In order to ensure justice and well-being in social, cultural, political, economic, and other spheres of human life, it is necessary to start by guaranteeing epistemic justice from an early age (Fricker, 2007). This principle is achieved in segments and realised in stages, and in order to get there, it is essential to allow young users of knowledges and practices inherent in human diversity to experience childhood, and subsequently their adult and democratic citizenship as interactive, participatory, and constructive experiences. To be achieved, this goal certainly requires training and educational programmes that should find support in a pedagogy built on a perspective that branches out into three lines of action: intercultural, intersectional, and decolonial (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). Thereby, the present reflection aims to explore avenues of a socio-pedagogical commitment that proves capable of promoting epistemic justice in both formal and informal contexts of personal growth, so that children can experience an intercultural childhood and, therefrom, a more equitable, more supportive, more inclusive, possibly peaceful, hence more broadly intercultural citizenship.

The classification of a territory as an inner area implies the recognition of specific socio-territorial characteristics and structural criticalities that may hinder local development processes and affect the quality of life of the resident population, particularly that of children. In Italy, this category includes territories characterized by geographical marginality, socio-economic and educational fragility, and a significant distance from the main centres providing essential services, especially in the fields of education, healthcare and transportation.

With the aim of counteracting these dynamics of territorial marginalization and the phenomena of depopulation and social exclusion, in 2013 the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) was launched, promoted by the Italian Agency for Territorial Cohesion within the framework of the 2014–2020 European Structural and Investment Funds programming (Agenzia per la Coesione Territoriale, 2021).

At the national level, the Strategy identified 72 inner areas characterized by low population density and a high ageing index. Within the context of the Tuscany Region, three inner areas were selected, including the Unione dei Comuni della Val di Bisenzio (Vaiano, Vernio and Cantagallo, in the province of Prato), which also presents significant criticalities in the educational and school sector.

Indeed, according to surveys conducted in recent years, the school population shows a significant percentage increase in girls and boys with Special Educational Needs within the two Comprehensive Institutes in the area. Due to these school and territorial vulnerabilities, these students risk becoming particularly exposed to phenomena of social exclusion and to a lack of adequate attention and responses to situations of fragility.

If the school represents a place of educational care (Certini, Distefano, 2024; Mortari, 2025) and democratic participation (Dewey, 1951) - offering everyone the opportunity to “bring out” their own uniqueness and welcoming, with appropriate tools, the many possible situations of childhood vulnerability (also in respect of everyone’s right to education) - then it has the responsibility to include within its staff professional figures capable of promoting both social and individual well-being, as well as inclusive practices (Crispiani, 2022; Iori, 2018; Miatto, 2023; Premoli, 2024; Premoli, 2025).

About this perspective, a doctoral research project was conducted in the territories of Vaiano, Vernio and Cantagallo, experimenting the inclusion of a pedagogist within school and local contexts in order to promote targeted and multi-perspective interventions aimed at preventing and counteracting possible forms of school marginalization and social exclusion, while expanding everyone’s opportunity to take part in the entire educational process through appropriate tools and within a democratic framework (Legge 27 dicembre 2017, n. 205; Legge 15 aprile 2024, n. 55; Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, 2020).

This contribution, after providing an overview of the school-territorial criticalities of the Unione dei Comuni della Val di Bisenzio, aims to present the main results of the research in order to promote reflections on the need to introduce pedagogical professionals within Italian school contexts.

Contemporary debates on early childhood education increasingly recognize children as active citizens capable of participation and meaning-making within democratic communities and entitled to exercise their rights within educational contexts (Commissione Europea, 2021; Consiglio d’Europa, 2022). However, educational practices often privilege the cognitive and linguistic dimensions of democratic experience, while the sensory, emotional, and relational foundations of it remain marginal (UNESCO, 2021; Nussbaum 2010).

Drawing on Luigina Mortari’s reflections on freedom and education, democracy requires citizens capable of thinking and acting in unexpected ways. As Mortari argues, “Totalitarianism asserts itself only by depriving citizens of their capacity to invent new worlds, because democracy vitally requires citizens who think in unexpected ways and who cannot be found -either in thought or in action- where those who hold power would like them to be in order to govern them” (Mortari, 2018, p. 106).

Starting from this reflection, the paper explores the meaning of feeling and the right to feel as fundamental educational dimensions for the construction of democratic citizenship from early childhood. Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes children’s right to participate freely in cultural and artistic life (United Nations, 1989). Yet this right should not only be interpreted as access to cultural activities, but also as the opportunity to develop the capacity to perceive, express, and interpret emotions, relationships, and experiences through shared artistic practices. In this perspective, feeling means being present: inhabiting the time of experience and developing that relational sensitivity that makes free and responsible action within a shared space possible (Dewey, 1934; Biesta, 2013; Mortari, 2015).

The capacity to think and act in unexpected ways -identified by Mortari as a vital condition for democracy- finds a meaningful pedagogical analogy in the practice of musical improvisation. Making music together can be understood as a genuine training ground for presence, where individuals immerse themselves in the vital flow of plural relationality through which each person shapes their humanity (Small, 1998; Branca, 2012; Zbranca et al., 2022; Higgins 2024). The relational dimension of making music clearly emerges playing together: through this process, musicians gradually learn to “breathe in unison,” building a form of shared attunement (Murakami & Ozawa, 2019). In this sense, musical experience -particularly collective improvisation- offers a unique pedagogical context for developing what can be described as micro-democratic competences that sustain children’s participation in shared social life: attentive listening, the ability to suspend one’s own intervention, openness to the unexpected, responsiveness to others, and the co-construction of meaning within a

shared process. Improvisation requires participants to remain present in the unfolding moment and to respond through gestures, sounds, pauses, and silences, practicing democratic relationality (Consiglio d’Europa, 2018; Bertinetto, 2021; Eurydice 2025).

This contribution therefore argues that collective musical improvisation can function as an early pedagogical laboratory of democratic participation, where children experience -through listening, responsiveness and co-creation- the relational competences that sustain democratic life, cultivating aware citizens capable of engaging creatively with the sonic and social worlds they inhabit (Cambi, 2016).

Can autonomy serve as the guiding principle for educating for democracy? Drawing on the teachings of John Dewey, Lamberto Borghi believed that education should have the task of fostering freedom, sociality, and universality, as well as autonomy of thought and volition, while avoiding any form of indoctrination or brainwashing. Education toward this autonomy represented “a living experience of democratic life,” arguing that “in a school where the thoughts and volitions of students are cultivated according to these forms of freedom, I already glimpse a democratic society in the making” (1952). Borghi also wondered how schools could fulfill their mission in a world suffering from the “constant, growing, and systematic pressure of governments, parties, and economic groups” that work “to create subjects, soldiers, partisans, or to develop technical skills in a specific branch of production—fragments of men and non-men” (1952).

His words remain highly relevant today: schools continue to be a battleground for economic and political interests, and even when educational institutions are established that are autonomous and independent of institutionalized power structures, they fail to guarantee the “universality” envisioned by Borghi. In the postwar period, the pedagogical debate he engaged in with Dina Bertoni Jovine proves extremely valuable for reflecting on today’s schools, their influences, and their prospects. Jovine, following in the footsteps of Suchodoloski’s socialist pedagogy and Gramsci’s thought, criticized pedagogical activism for an excess of spontaneity and a tendency to focus solely on the current needs of students, based on the conviction that “education limited to the present was at the same time the best preparation of the student for the future” (1957). The pedagogical vision put forward by Jovine, on the other hand, considered it fundamental to link the education of the child with the perspectives of pedagogy and socialist political thought: to view “man in a concrete way, in a specific place in history (…) at the crossroads of the incessant struggle of the new against the old (…) The problem of choosing cultural values rises to the importance of a major social issue; the orientation of individuals depends on general solutions” (1957).

We live in a society permeated and governed by the special interests of large financial, technological, and military conglomerates, while politics—having progressively lost the influence it once held in the days when Borghi and Jovine were writing—flounders helplessly, attempting to exert an ideological influence on the school system that is increasingly shaped by the spread of “democracies.” What cultural values can we promote to educate for democracy? Can we truly foster autonomy in today’s society? What experiences of democracy can we offer to children in 2026, shielding them from the influence of neoliberal, authoritarian, and war-driven economic policies? By attempting to synthesize the thought of L. Borghi and D.B. Jovine, we will identify some trajectories, imagining democratic and participatory experiences free from the interests of large private monopolistic groups and authoritarian ideology, while attempting to outline renewed resistant pedagogical and democratic approaches (2022).

Unschooling is often seen as a sort of escape from school, which is mainly considered as a guarantee for democracy. As a consequence, unschooling is mostly perceived as an anti-democratic form of education, as a way to avoid social duties, solidarity, respect for institutions, and the social dimension in general, as a way to keep away from what is “different” and from the difficulties and challenges you face at school.

This might be caused by a misunderstanding or a lack of knowledge about unschooling.

In fact, being per definition a child-led and non-coercive learning path (Holt 1967), unschooling can be seen as a democratic approach to education, where learning happens naturally (Vezzola, 2020) through life experiences in everyday society, by encouraging participation in daily decisions, collaboration, and social awareness and by nurturing fairness, respect, and empathy (Piffero, 2019). Children learn from an early age that their voices matter and this prepares them for lifelong engagement and social justice.

In this way, children are recognized as present-day citizens who can make decisions and are encouraged to engage in community action and social responsibility.

So, children can experience a democratic, respectful, negotiation- and participation-based way of growing, learning and relating to people from very different backgrounds, conditions and origins (Leali, 2025).

This paper aims to show some experiences of democratic education based on the principles of equality and citizenship in unschooling.